Unity Technologies today released a sneak peek of the Book of the Dead, which demonstrates the power of real-time rendering on Unity. Making extensive use of Unity’s new rendering system, the Scriptable Render Pipeline Book of the Dead shows how developers can take total control of the rendering process to achieve a level of detail and visual fidelity.
“Achieving the feelings a forest evokes is one of the hardest challenges when working within real-time graphics. We set out to tackle this with Book of the Dead to see how much a small team like ours could accomplish working within Unity,” said Unity Technologies creative director Veselin Efremov.
“Seeking out challenges like this helps Unity to evolve and advance. We use new features when they’re introduced early in their development cycle and we partner closely with our tech teams to push new features to their limits, so that the innovations we uncover together will make a better product for our developers. When a demo is done, we know that the engine has achieved new functionality; and we are excited to see developers use this tech for their next creations.”
Built using Unity 2018’s Scriptable Render Pipeline, Progressive Lightmapper, and Post-Processing Stack, the sneak peek at Book of the Dead gives viewers a look at the first-person interactive experience being played in real-time, targeting the PlayStation 4 computer entertainment system. The story unfolds in two parallel timelines, and as the audience views the scattered memories of the protagonist, they discover there’s more to her story than she is willing to tell. More information on how Book of the Dead came to life can be found on the website.
The release of Unity 2017.3 in December completed a year-long cycle which delivered tools such as Timeline and Cinemachine, empowering teams of artists and developers to do more together. Unity 2018 will build on this foundation to give advanced developers and engineers a control of new features such as the Scriptable Render Pipeline and the C# Job System, the first versions of two major features that will continue to evolve to help unlock beautiful graphics and increase run time performance on Unity.
Unity 2018 places total control of a new rendering process in the hands of advanced developers. With the Scriptable Render Pipeline, the developers now have the freedom to control the rendering engine without the complexities of writing a complete rendering pipeline which leads to an increase in graphics quality and gameplay performance in AAA console, PC and mobile.
The C# Job System is a new multi-threaded system that makes it possible to take advantage of multi-core processors without the heavy programming headaches. Combined with a new programming model (Entity Component System), it enables developers to optimise creations for major increases in performance. Developers can add more effects and complexity to their games, or use that horsepower to add complex AI, to make rich worlds that immerse gamers.
